April 18, Saturday

About five years ago, newspaper editors often received notices from departments that certain Internet messages should not be published. However, that has changed.

Now, most of my commentary of current events can be published in newspapers but restricted on the Internet. The editor of mainstream websites are informed that they should not publish or reduce or comment on my articles.

Why is this the case? I attribute this to the breakthrough in the past five years of public opinion. The Internet can create a lot of topics that newspapers cannot. They’re under the same control on public opinion space. But why did the Internet make bigger options? In my opinion, the most important reason is now we’re seeing everyday forms of resistance of the people on the Internet, this public opinion space.

The concept of “everyday forms of resistance” is borrowed from James Scott of Yale University. Scott originally studied Southeast Asia peasants’ reactions to the elite. The peasants’ tools were weapons of the weak that included laziness, dissimulation, pretending to obey, stealing, and slander.

Chinese netizens also face similar conditions. They must come head-to-head with the extremely strong power of the government. They often use the weapons of the weak: buying soy sauce, speaking out about push-ups and hide-and-seek, raising the topic of anti-anti-vulgarity. They use technology to show the abuses of power. Netizens of China are becoming more and more innovative in the ways they are protesting. And just as the Southeast Asian peasants discovered, netizens are finding that these weapons are very effective.

But how will these weapons of the weak change the existing social structure? I don’t know exactly.

转自China Digital Times 报道（须翻墙才见）